Well here's a reason for you. It's not going to make Big Pharma millions of dollars.

Quoting: Anonymous Coward 22901085

And you really believe that don't you?

It takes on average $900 million to develop a single drug. Think about it. $900 million. That’s an amount of money that even Bill Gates would have trouble finding down the back of the sofa on a regular basis. Of the drugs that get out of pre-clinical testing, 70% will fail at Phase 1 trial stage. One of the reasons that drug discovery is so expensive is that (apart from the fact that it’s difficult), the pharmaceutical industry is so heavily regulated.

Now I’m not defending Big Pharma. Far from it. I can't stand them. Their price fixing and handling of off-patent drugs in the 3rd world is criminal, they aren’t always transparent with their methods and data and when they mess up, people die. But they exist to make money and if, for example, 1 in 3 people in the Western world will get cancer in their lifetime do you not think that they would exploit a cure, any cure and have us over a barrel to make money from it? Not to mention the kudos, the plaudits, the Nobel Prizes that any scientist would receive if they managed to cure the potentially incurable? The idea that they would regularly throw away close to a billion dollars while sitting on possibly one of the most lucrative ideas of all time is laughable.

Quoting: Cahill

You might like this one hehehe

"I point to the excellent research by Merrill Goozner who did a massively thorough debunking of the $800 million number seven years ago, showing that the true number was closer to $35 million."

Ah, you have to buy his book to see how he's done it though....I know from my time in the medical device industry I know exactly just how much money it costs to bring a brand-new device to market. Okay themes on an existing device don't cost as much which is why the companies bring out "families" of devices but a brand new costs millions upon millions.

But even if the figure is much lower, how much would a single pharma company stand to make with a cancer cure? From a financial perspective that's the Holy Grail of pharmaceuticals.I really don't understand the logic of people stating the opposite.